Mehrgarh, a farming village below the Bolan Pass

Mehrgarh lies on the Kachi plain in Balochistan, where the Bolan Pass comes down from the uplands towards the Indus. A French mission under Jean-François and Catherine Jarrige found it in 1974 and dug until 1986. The lowest levels are a village of mud-brick houses and a cemetery, with no pottery, whose people grew barley and wheat and kept sheep, goats and cattle. Lapis lazuli and turquoise in the Neolithic deposits came from the north. The site was largely abandoned around 2600 BCE, as the Indus cities rose.

It matters to the map because it is still the only site in the north-west of the subcontinent where Neolithic levels have been widely excavated and radiocarbon dated, so the story of how farming began here hangs on its dates.

Those dates are in dispute. Jarrige put the first period at about 8000 BCE and read it as a local beginning; textbooks usually say about 7000 BCE. In 2025 Benjamin Mutin and colleagues dated tooth enamel from 23 graves across the cemetery's nine levels and placed its start between 5223 and 4914 BCE, for a span of two to five centuries. That would make farming here a late arrival from the west. It is one study and no published reply was found, so this page keeps the older date with a margin wide enough to hold both.